rare talents may die unused within long dresses hiding almost everything –

hems’ devoutness derived from dragging in the “steadfast dust symbolic.”

Write me an e-mail; I can’t handle you on the phone, you’re too gentle.

Fairness shmairness. Good breeding doesn’t promise good sex, doesn’t

brighten the dreary saltmarsh ahead of us, clumpy and gray, its fetid

air already drooling out to frighten us: what if we can’t stop finding

wealth better than poverty? No Buddhists we if Rhine wine mixed with

seltzer water still makes a near-perfect cure for the morning after.

Surge

A tree is a scepter-shaft with leaves.

From the midst of such stiffness flowers surge

combining us in such an aura of scents or ideas

individuals forget for instance

to stop at traffic lights not

in suicide but swept and

then rolled away, waves on a beach,

so that chromosome strings may replicate

without a single thought

of consequence.

It goes like this: a man and a woman are alone.

Then children arrive. It’s perfect

the way the world occurs, in patterns.

Centuries fly. The idea of Eden

arrives, seeming inevitable, then dislodges,

a cerebral miscarriage.

The oncomingness of the world never slackens.

There was a crisp sunrise this morning.

The neighbors played golf. To what can one be

faithful by never gratifying desire?

Signals are reaching us from tall metal towers.

The mockingbird sounded surprised by the song

he just sang, the one he’ll never be able to repeat

or remember, the one with the holy sphere

of the world wholly in it. Flowers do bloom anywhere,

even from guns. We hold our pencils

at the ready. We hold our magic breath: what

will the leads speak? Invisible gigantic machinery

shifts into a higher gear. Inside the crashing drone

an unheard symphony appears to be writing itself.

Off again, on again

Music videos cadence out through screens, summer midnight.

Most rooms with TVs on are occupied,

but never all.

Forgetting builds itself brick by brick into

a gazebo of oblivion, sights without smells,

words without passion, a glance, a slant lightbeam

lost in a dusty barn, the barn torn down

or moved, relic and anonymous, to another county.

Or the red and blue top left spinning in Don Wilson’s basement.

Let it spin, let it go, it could not be more gone

though I was the one who had to leave for supper.

Luxury speedboat tunneled

into a huge wave. Fairy-ring mushrooms

devoured by ants. Your departure

rips like an invisible gesture, setting beyond the horizon –

that absence tinged with afterglow, faintly Venetian.

We come together again,

optimistic as acrobats, one in the air, one on the trapeze

measuring the distance, growing, shrinking.

Or maybe this is all behind us if to begin is to begin to end.

Don’t worry. Think of me

as plump and happy, just like that Florida man

selling bottled water labeled “Fountain of Youth.”

It can’t hurt if he gets rich and famous,

and he’s happy to help anyone be silly and human.

Lost in the rough

I’ve pushed into thickets so thorny

frenzy’s spontaneous, and turned, turned

back, whipping myself harder, ducking

only to jab my head

on sticks I hadn’t seen, straightening

only to release lithe canes of briars snared

when I’d ducked, that snap.

Calm is best. Calm

is an accomplishment, helpful for golf,

not essential like the Autonomic Nervous System,

Gravity, Entropy, sun’s Fusion, sweep of Galaxy.

I’ve been thinking about popcorn: the child’s warm

tight skin, richly glowing, subject suddenly

to having to grow up. No wonder

people get out of hand, enduring it.

You maybe thought I was just out looking for my ball

or a little exercise?

Don’t nestle in here

thinking you deserve my trust.

You’re likely to fly off

and maybe take my arms with you. Myself,

I’ve done that to others already. More than once.

We don’t explode just once.

Love, it’s not all fairway.

DAVID McALEAVEY has had work in many journals over many years, ranging from Ron Silliman’s mimeo mag Tottel’s through Ploughshares, Poetry and The Georgia Review; since early 2010 He's had over a hundred poems and prose poems accepted/published by Epoch, Poetry Northwest, Denver Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, diode poetry journal, anderbo.com, FRiGG, Stand (U.K.), Drunken Boat, and dozens of others. Pirene’s Fountain awarded him their Editors’ Prize for the best poem in their publication in 2011; in 2012, Convergence presented an “Editor’s Choice” special feature of his poems; and in 2013, New Delta Review has included one of his prose poems in their “best of the web” anthology. His fifth and most recent book is HUGE HAIKU (317 pp., Chax Press, Tucson, 2005). He teaches literature and creative writing at George Washington University in D.C.